““You have something else to do now.” I shook mine back at her, perplexed. “No, I don’t.” Mika fixed me with a look that said, for all my knowing what a princess should know, I was really and truly stupid. “He’s been waiting for you,” she said. My heart did a tiny flip. “Kiernan?” “Who else?” Mika snorted. I had been thinking about him constantly; he intruded into every other thought, even my sadness over Orianne. But I hadn’t seen him, not since the coronation. Maybe I had been right, I had begun to think when he never appeared on Philantha’s doorstep: he had given up on me. “Are you still worried about what his parents will think? You’re the princess’s chief advisor now,” Mika scolded. “You can hold your head up in any room in the country. But if you’re worried about it, I suppose I could grant you a title…” I laughed without meaning to, shaking my head. “No, no,” I said. And then, more seriously: “I don’t think I’m worried about that anymore. I saved the country, didn’t I? Surely that counts for something.” But then, doubt crept in again. “But he hasn’t come,” I said plaintively. Mika put a hand on the gate, as if she would leave, but then she turned and sighed. “He’s letting you make up your own mind, because that’s the only way you’ll ever really let him in. This time,” she said, “you’re going to have to go to him.””
